| In the current study the relationship between mental representational abilities and figurative language comprehension was examined in children aged 37 to 106 months of age. The general hypothesis examined was that advances in figurative language comprehension would be associated with advances in mental representational ability. Figurative language comprehension was measured using a task modeled after those used by Happe (1991) and Andrews, Rosenblatt, Malkus, Gardner, and Winner (1986). In the current task children listened to 10 stories, five ending in a metaphoric utterance and five ending in an ironic utterance. After hearing the stories children's comprehension of the utterances were measured through forced-choice and pictorial measures. Mental representational abilities were measured using tasks modeled after those used to measure children's level of theory of mind that were devised by Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985) and Perner and Wimmer (1985). While children's level of theory of mind was found to be related to figurative language comprehension, increases in age eclipsed most of these relationships: age was the best predictor of children's performance on the figurative language task. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for extant theories of figurative language comprehension. Several methodological flaws of the current study are discussed, as are considerations for future research in this area. |
